Honor students: Value extra work

By Angelina McNeela

The University Honors Program requires all 1,100 honors students to submit resumes for review today.

Honors students may feel like sending a resume is burdensome, given their pre-existing obligations or workloads. But, instead of feeling overwhelmed, honors students should perceive sending their resume as an opportunity and take advantage of campus resources while they can.

Students need to be forced to practice doing things they don’t necessarily enjoy before they become adept at a skill.

“This is my first semester in this program and I was really impressed,” said Alex Carpenter, junior pre-physical therapy major. “It makes you feel more integrated into the school and there’s a lot more resources out there than I was aware of … before.”

The resume requirement has a few goals in mind from preparing student for career success to applying for scholarships or grad-school, “initiatives that come from President Doug Baker’s four pillars,” said Associate Vice Provost Jerome Bowers.

“A lot of first-year students, for example, come to us and say, ‘Well, I have not done anything.’ Well, we’re trying to say … ‘Give us your resume. Put something together … let us give you feedback and get professional insights,’” Bowers said.

Writing a competitive resume — not simply finding a random template from a Google search — is one of the many skills honor students have to hone by graduation when they may no longer have the resources available to students. They should take advantage of them.

“I just see that as a sign that they really care about what we’re going to get out of school and try and get us to get the most out of this as possible,” Carpenter said.

No one should have to pull teeth for offering to help honors students. Besides, the submission deadline for resumes couldn’t have come at a better time with this year’s Full-Time Job Fair on Oct. 22.

“If a student has a real urgency and says, ‘Hey, I am going to the job fair on the 21 and 22,’ let us know and we’ll be more than happy to elevate it to the top of the cue,” Bowers said.